


Battlefield

by TheOriginalSuki



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Dark Reylo, Dominant Kylo Ren, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Dyad (Star Wars), Hades and Persephone Vibes, Hurt/Comfort, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rey is Not a Palpatine, Slow Burn, Unhealthy Relationships, Working Out My Feelings Through Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22285150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOriginalSuki/pseuds/TheOriginalSuki
Summary: Kylo Ren took the galaxy, and Kylo Ren takes Rey.  There’s nothing left for him to accomplish, Vader’s vision is complete – only he’s still in pain.  And no matter how he manoeuvres around the scavenger girl, it’s not easing up.(This is not an easy love story.)
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 33
Kudos: 76





	1. Chapter 1

When he sees her again, at last, he gives her an ultimatum.

He's not thought beyond its vice-grip to sit with the reality of either decision. He assumes, in some closed-off part of him, that if she refuses, he will kill her friends. If she assents, then he only knows that he will have navigated one more excruciating step toward a brooding, sinister silence he desperately seeks. Not peace, never peace. Peace is a lie of the Light Side.

She is essential. That is all he knows. Knows it like he knows that to press a knife to his flesh will cut and bleed. Her essentiality is something he long ago gave up questioning.

He puts out a gloved hand, palm upward, but holds his chin high, angled. He is before her, but he is not with her. She has shut him out and, with a resounding finality, slid the bolts in place. So be it then. He begged once. He will not beg again. 

Of course, he cannot see from the outside in: that the barely still surface of him tremors over churning, roiling depths. He's subsided for so long on desperation. He can't even taste it any more, much less recognise it.

She looks at him, her face set, from beneath infinite lashes. Oh, she could give him a lesson in holding back. Was the Rey from before even real? Because this one looks like her, sounds like her, but her compassion is dead. She is better than him, even in this. In some hell, Snoke cackles.

He chooses his words to savour, to drive them in like tiny pins. "You. Or them."

He cannot see the moment that she knows -- or perhaps she always did -- perhaps she expected it would always come to this, and made her decision long ago. Her answer, like her countenance, is a world shuttered against him.

"I'll come with you. I'll _only_ come with you. I will not join the Dark Side."

He sucks in a breath between raw lips. Too much, too fast. He thrusts down on emotion and instinct, on reaction, and forces himself to ride every second like it is all there is. He turns his open palm, just so.

She jolts forward, toward him. She is a mask of herself, an impostor. He suppresses the urge to scream. 

And Rey walks pointedly around him, shunning his proffered hand -- giving him nothing, not even her contempt -- as she strides up the platform to board the ship.

***

He follows behind her like a pet at heel. His agents usher her, a sluice of bodies, so that she must move toward an empty corridor. Behind, the ramp shuts with a puff of air. 

The dark corridor is a bridge; its purpose to connect one point with another. It is blank, ugly, serviceable. The doors close them in a bubble of silence, save for the minute and distant beeping which is the pulse of a living star ship. They are alone. They could be the only two organisms in existence, and the short stifling hallway the entire galaxy. An alien, uncalled for vision comes to him from nowhere -- a wish for a window. A field of stars.

Halfway through the corridor, Rey slows and stops. He pulls up behind her, keeping their distance. He stares over her shoulder, stares past her trying to divine his next step. But there is only the steely, shut doors.

"Well," she says, and he does not know if the echo is the desolate corridor or her voice. "You got what you wanted."

***

Does he have what he wanted?

The question rides his shoulder like a dark bird. He wanted power; he wanted her, with him, when he took that power. And he has both. Now all that is left is to snuff out the last valiant strongholds of the Resistance, and ascend to his place in the galaxy. Then the shucking off of the broken boy will be complete.

He didn't expect to be happy. But he thought he would feel _something_. Some kind of relief.

***

She sulks for days.

He watches her from the surveillance, a blue hologram suspended over the surface of a table two levels from reality. She picks herself up with the effort of someone swimming upstream, and carries herself about the room, like a discarded piece of wreckage. She swaddles herself in blankets on the bunk and sleeps, for hours and hours. When she wakes she paces, stares, then goes back to sleep. Droids move in and out. Sometimes she notices them, sometimes she doesn't. They run on clockwork, bringing a tray of food at one end of the day and removing it, untouched, at the other.

This is no petulant protest. He knows intimately that kind of immaturity, and this is not that. She's resigned to dying, killing herself with apathy. His skin heats, then plummets to a ruminating chill. A sensation he recalls once from childhood, fever complete with the fog of delirium. Anger is a constant companion. It's so seeped him in its presence he no longer notices. But this, this is different.

He goes in to her.

She is asleep on her stomach in a bath of starlight, her head turned away toward the wall. She hasn't bothered to change. The clothes she arrived in are stale and limp; her boots slump in a corner, where she kicked them off four days prior. He sits in a black armchair facing her bedside, his posture crouched like an insect; and he knows she stirs, not due to any outward noise or motion, but because she senses him. Turns her head and gazes with a disconcerting blankness (he must be swathed in the deep shadows cast from stars, just as she is) and then is still. 

It is strange to see her face without feeling her. Like trying to read a map without a key. The landscape of her features are alarmingly foreign. As when one wakes in a familiar place in the dark and recognises nothing.

He starts to speak, and the sound of his voice, straining against the thick-woven silence, punctures his nerves. "It's time to begin your training."

He balances on the precarious edge of his order. He can have no idea of how she will react. That's the thing with Rey. He can never really _know_ her, even when he brushed against her exposed and candid mind. She is a live spark, independent of him. The fact she'd burn away, a celestial body in the dark, even if he did not exist, even if he was not there to witness it. This makes him inexplicably angry.

Her answer comes, dull, lacking. "No."

He expects the rage to rise and swell in him, but it falters and sinks, a wave in the undertow. Deep fatigue invades him. It spreads, like blood in the water.

He shifts minutely. He catches something, a reflection, in her iris. He thinks maybe it is his scar.

Over a shaky inhale, he says, "You _will_ submit yourself to me, Rey."

Her eyes are on him without seeing him. "Will you break me into submission?"

"If I have to."

Now she stirs. Pushes up on her palms, slowly sitting, legs crossed in a tangle of sheets. And there -- there it is! -- a flicker, as of someone peeking out from behind a curtain.

" _Ben_." She breathes the name. The curtain pulls aside an inch -- just enough to let fall a beam of her uncensored feeling. It plunges like a lightsaber. He practically smells the burning.

He stands, startling the chair across the room. Self-preservation chokes him: _run away, run away, run away_. But the needy little boy buried in his spleen claws to stay.

_This_ \-- this _thing_ happening right _here_ \-- is the final battlefield.

He is barely holding ground. One live flame away from catastrophe. And here they are, electric currents snapping along the synapses between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story takes place shortly after the events of The Last Jedi. If The Rise of Skywalker went a different way re: The Fall of Ben Solo. I am actually an optimist, I promise!
> 
> Un-betaed. Unashamedly thirsty for comments. Follow me on tumblr @theOriginalSuki.


	2. Chapter 2

Kylo Ren _flees_.

The fact of this should burn through him like acid; but he can only retreat, snatching himself away from her like a hand from flame. He cannot allow himself to soften, to be pried open and disembowelled by her seeing, sympathetic eyes. The last time he did, when she put out her hand in the dark, and he met her halfway, reaching ... in the aftermath of their camaraderie, the smell of burning flesh and coppery blood hot in his nostrils, on the heels of his pleading ... she betrayed him. Oh, he is tomb-tired. The paths of rejection well-travelled in him. He should be impervious to fresh tracks.

He's a feral animal, cornered by inscrutable pain. Nothing to do now but to gnaw off the limb.

When he confronts her again, it will be from behind the antipathetic wall of his mask.

_He hates her, he hates her, he hates her._ But the alternative is worse.

***

He only has so long before Hux corners him again, and he's not sure that he won't try to snap the man's vertebrae. Although he is now the Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren is not a free agent. The powers that move the First Order are many and complex. With Snoke dead, he'd cut off the head of the snake -- only for three more to sprout up in its place. And what a vociferous little head General Hux is. By now, he's surely sniffed out Ren's treachery. He will insist on knowing what kind of strategy called for the Supreme Leader to pull back on a Resistance attack.

His mood simmers when he thinks how much easier it would be with Rey with him. If she would just _cooperate_.

He stalks into her darkened room, causing her to jump into a sitting position. She pivots, turned in on herself, legs dangled off the edge of the bed. She is not as small as she looks, he has to remind himself. She can bite in a pinch.

Before he can reassess, before she can speak or look at him with treacherous affinity, he grips her arm in his gloved fingers and hauls her to her feet. He steers her in his pitiless grasp through the panelled doors, out into the false too-bright light of the corridor. She doesn't protest but she doesn't help, so that they go in an awkward trot, some half-lame four-legged creature. He keeps his masked face straight ahead of him, and she trips behind, her shoulder thrust upward by the pull of his arm on hers.

If they pass other souls, he is not aware. He holds the knowledge that this is the second time they have touched at arm's length, even as he physically keeps her near. He hears her pant and he nearly lets go. But he adjusts his grasp and shoves away his discomfort.

They travel the labyrinthine ways of the Steadfast, from inside outward. He moves with single-minded intention, until, at last, they stop before an air-lock, and he presses the buttons on the keypad. The mechanics roll and work within. The door unlatches and lifts, opening to a small chamber. On the further side is a second, small door, accessing the cruel black of open space.

He shoves Rey through and lets go. She stumbles in, catches her balance, and turns slowly around to stare at him. He's never seen her so pale.

"Go on, then." His voice crackles, inorganic through the modulator. "If you've made up your mind to die, what are you waiting for? Get on with it."

The red light on the door signals that the safety lock is off. He allows himself to watch, measuring her, the pulse at her neck, while her thoughts work their way out in the muscles of her forehead. His breathing stutters when her eyes flicker over the chamber, landing on the outer door. On the handle that opens it. His is a calculated risk, and he holds himself taut, ready to act. But her face reddens and licks to life, and he knows he has chosen rightly. She glares at him, her body rigid and alive with antagonism.

_There she is._

They stand off for two minutes, neither giving way. Then he reaches for her abused arm and tugs her back in, slamming his hand on the console to close the chamber.

***

He's tempered the mounting fever in him, caused by -- whatever it was she was doing; it doesn't matter because he's stopped it now. Yet he is far from cool. As he steers her back to her room, he has enough presence of mind to mark the other bodies -- storm troopers, technicians, officers -- making large arcs to avoid them. The change in her is palpable. It tingles through the leather of his fingers. This temper is hers alone. 

Because the Force bond is brutally shut to him. It's safer that way. 

He handles her back through the door of her room, stepping in behind, and this time, she jerks her arm from his grasp. Anger and relief vie for dominance on the stage of his consciousness. The door slides shut and beeps, locking.

"Now bathe," he says. There is no temptation to influence her the Jedi way. Even if she were not impervious to manipulation, he needs her to have the choice. To emphasise his instructions, he goes into the adjoining alcove and turns on the taps in the tub. Steam clumps and drifts. "And wash your hair." He steps out and around her. "Then you're going to eat something."

He offers her his turned back -- the only indication that he expects her to comply in his presence. He cannot see her truly, but he imagines she clenches and un-clenches her fingers. Freckles stand out furiously on her cheeks. He can play this game with her, this power struggle conducted with wills sharpening, one against the other. He has nowhere he'd rather go, and his mask shields him and fortifies him. She seems to know that, too. Because he hears her shuffle, the sweep of clothes coming off, crumpling to the floor, the lap of water as she settles in.

He turns around and crosses the room in two broad steps. From the doorway he can see her sitting in the tub. Water streams between her shoulder blades. Her legs are drawn up and her arms wrap around them; she is an egg of herself. The limp buns on her head droop in the steam. Her eyes close, her brows draw together. His palm presses the console, and the door slides shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm fascinated with Kylo Ren's perspective, clearly. It's definitely a challenge to limit myself to him. Kylo is bizarrely gentle with Rey as an enemy. Except for scooping her up in the bridal carry, he *never* touches her. Even when they're lightsaber duelling, there's a kind of formality to it -- he doesn't kick out at her or anything, as far as I remember. The violence that is so integral to his character is absent with her, and I wanted to be true to that characterisation, so I struggled with having him manhandle her in this chapter.
> 
> I'm also concerned about Rey's appearing out of character. It always helps to be able to explore *why* someone does what they do, so I'm considering exploring from her point of view. Feel free to talk to me about it! Thanks so much for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

While he waits, he tries not to wonder which Rey is worse -- the one who showed him herself and then shut him out, leaving a ghost-shaped scar of herself on him? Or the one that could still, even now, brush up against his inner self and take him apart like a faulty engine? When she came to him cold and hard, it stung that the person he thought he knew was false. But when she opened the bond to him such a little bit, face to bare-face in the dark, the flood of his want and weakness disgusted him. Behind his mask, he presses his lips together until they turn white.

The door to the alcove slides open and she steps out in a puff of steam. Her hair is limp and wet, and she wears a white, shapeless frock that ends mid-calf. She eyes him, tracing the contours of his mask, calculating her move.

She lands somewhere between the sterile rejection of her first few days and the pendulum-swing between tenderness and frustration. He's grateful for _that_. She approaches the far side of the table where he sits and lowers herself into a chair. Folds her hands together on the table surface. Her stance is clear. _Now what?_

He slides a covered dish to her across the table. He'd sent for food while she bathed, and now she stares at it with uncertainty. She carefully unfolds her hands and lifts the cover off the dish. A different steam engulfs her, and he sees her nostrils twitch. She picks up the spoon and draws a mouthful of something colourful and savoury to her lips. Before she bites, her eyes go to him and stare pointedly. Then she eats.

***

After the initial high of Crait, when the adrenaline died down and they were allowed to sink into the knowledge of their anemic numbers, Rey let herself sit with the moments of their final Force bond. She was all but certain she had closed the bridge between their minds, their emotions -- and for the better, because the lost-looking boy kneeling alone at a distance, holding the phantom of his father's dice as they disappeared, threatened to gut her, from nose to navel.

The ennui snuck up on her. It was strange because she never before had time to be sad, to feel sorry for herself. She had to fight to live. Even in the wake of meeting Finn and discovering her affinity to the Force, Rey dashed from one desperate situation to the next. No time to reflect, no time to process. And then Kylo Ren got jammed into the midst of it all. Utterly against her will, his presence grew and took up space in her -- almost to the point of comfort. He put out roots in her and clung tight. And when he told her she wasn't alone -- words the like of which she longed to hear, a lifetime long -- she needed him to be okay. She believed he would be okay. Because how could anything so utterly depraved choose to care about her, on purpose?

It was more than just his hand he extended to her in the throne room. He offered her something vital, like an anchor thrown to a drowning man; and then with a few carelessly placed words, snapped it away again. She'd never _been_ so bereft. Not even the gnawing emptiness of hunger rivalled his rejection. When she woke in the aftermath, the room littered with bodies, burning down around them, reason told her to kill him. But the little scavenger girl who wanted nothing more than to belong just couldn't. Couldn't absent him from her world any more than he already did himself.

The despair of Kylo's betrayal flooded in when Crait dispelled. It only agitated their failure to regroup. She'd been short with Finn, and irked that he'd made a connection with someone that wasn't her -- with two someones. Poe Dameron was a better pilot than she, and she shouldn't begrudge him that. But she wanted Leia to look at her, fondle over her, and it was obvious that this man was a favourite of General Organa's. Is that when Ben had felt? (No, not _Ben_. Kylo Ren.)

Holding onto hope was a well-practised skill. Some muscle or tendon must have got damaged because it grew harder and harder for her. What was worse, the encroaching darkness _scared_ her. She wished desperately for Master Skywalker, someone to talk to, someone to understand. Someone to scrutinise the darkness within, to amputate, if need be.

It didn't take long for the First Order to lock onto them and chase them into the back alleys of the galaxy. And then, the transmission, from Supreme Leader Kylo Ren himself, backing them into a corner and giving them his ultimatum.

Rey hated him. Hated the way the lack of him hurt so much. She felt the temptation to scald him as he had her. To show him how it felt to be left adrift on your own in a cold universe. To stand firm out of spite and dare him to mow her down. To let him taste her final defiance and leave him with the unravelled thread of whatever had begun with them. But she couldn't allow her petty anger, her damaged affections, to harm innocents. So she agreed to go to him.

She agreed. She projected her hurt and hatred all about her like a poisonous film, and made it _work_. She's a survivor, after all.


	4. Chapter 4

The room feels different to Rey now that it is lit. In the dark the only light trickled blue from the distant stars. She doesn't wonder at the luxury of her accommodation. Window or no, it is a prison.

When he put her in that room, the dark flooded her, and she sunk into it. But even in despair, she couldn't let him go. When he said he would make her submit, it ran over the nerve of something she thought couldn't be hurt any more. In a moment of desperation, she almost rekindled the bond. Something sparked between them. But it was clear he didn't want it; because he quit her company immediately. Rey was sure this was a punishment for reaching out. When he returned wearing the mask, she hadn't thought he could have taken any more of himself away from her.

She was drowning in darkness. And then, he threw her a lifeline.

When he shoved her into the airlock, he gave her something to fight for. Even if it is only because he needs her alive.

***

She eats with little grace, and he makes a mental note that this is one of the things he will have to teach her. He has already repaired the broken legacy lightsaber. He hopes that offering it back to her will give him some leverage to goad her into training.

When she finishes eating -- and it turns out she was _ravenous_ , that much is clear -- Rey sets down the spoon with a measured clink, and continues to stare. He takes comfort in knowing that she cannot see muscle spasm beneath his eye.

No, he will not be the first to speak. He went first in the throne room when he offered her his hand, and expended the limit of his magnanimity.

The seconds tick by. At last, Rey says, "I've called you a monster and a snake before. But I never took you for a coward."

He lets out a soft _hm_ , almost thoughtful. "You disapprove of the mask." He is too intrigued at her ability to read him sans-bond to feel shame at her accuracy.

"If you're going to break me, at least have the decency to look me in the eye."

He leans back in the chair, considering her offer. But he doesn't want her to touch anything tender and essential in him, doesn't think he could take it. Which is an uncomfortable thought. Which in turns makes him angry and not want to remove his mask. It occurs to him for the first time that he hasn't really thought this through. How he intends to dominate her, rule her, but not let her too near. It is the kind of thing Snoke would use to hurt him -- holding it back until the opportune time and then showing it to him: how careless, how childish, how conflicted he truly is.

He folds his hands together on the table, leather creaking. "How about this? You do something for me, I do something for you."

She eyes him uncertainly. "You mean like ... a compromise."

He shrugs. Waits while she considers this. It is tempting to reach out with his mind and try to steal a glimpse at what is going on inside.

"All right," she says. Firmly, "Take off your mask."

He cocks his head. "You first."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren doesn't have what it takes to "break" Rey, and he's the last person to know that!


End file.
